#im destroying myself mentally emotionally physically spiritually

[im-miss-sugar-pink]

Hello,

Hope I'm not bothering you!

Tbh the dude you are talking about doesn't sound good, even if he may be attractive. And fornication isn't worth it one way or another. It will just break your heart.

On a different note: I saw you are going through a hard time, I'm praying for you. Hope you have someone to reach out and confide in who can help irl like friends, or therapist or a priest (or all of them :D). Remember, that you are loved no matter what. <3

thank you

in my heart i know you're completely right and i should 100% listen to you

but my head wants to destroy my body, and the wants of my body want to destroy my spirit and so far recently my head and desires are winning

--

as a long, rambling response:

i know that this guy is not going to be good for me and i know the last guy i was in a situationship with was bad for me and i know i should just stop doing this to myself. and i constantly think of this book i had as a kid called "the princess and the kiss" where basically her "kiss" was a magic glowing light and she saved it and saved it until a poor farmer boy came and told her he had one too that he had saved for her and then thats who she chose over her fancy suitors and they exchanged kisses and got married. i think about that a lot. but im no princess and i gave away what i have years ago. what am i now lol (i started crying just now remembering how much i wanted to be like the princess in this old kids' book and failed)

i just got out of the mental hospital for the THIRD time. third time. in two and a half years. im so tired. it's so much easier to let myself suffer than to actually do anything about it. getting better is difficult and sometimes i dont know if i want to. like. i have to. i have to because if He didn't want me to get better then God would have let me die by now and He would not have put such good people in my life, good people who make sure i end up in the hospital rather than a casket. but it's so hard. it's overwhelmingly difficult to believe that all the positive things i reblog apply to me as well as to everyone else. like oh yeah. im not the exception to the idea that everyone deserves love and mercy and grace. but it's so difficult to actually believe that.

ive been to Mass twice in the past two or three months. only twice. that's probably part of why i feel like shit but i feel so terrible that i feel undeserving of even entering a church? it sucks. then im like. yah i should go to confession. ok good in theory. but ive got this thought stuck in my head like i Know im going to end up partaking in these shitty habitual sins again and again so like why should i say to God that im going to do my best to avoid these sins when i know i wont end up doing that no matter how much i mean it. also it's difficult to get to confession? like im usually busy during or forget about the scheduled times for them and then asking for a priest to hear my confession before Mass is always anxiety-inducing and difficult to do when you don't feel like you can even enter a church.

almost nothing im doing is good for me. and idk how much i care. jk i do care but i dont want to care. i was talking to someone about how i cry all the time because i have so many feelings and everything matters too much, and they were all like well i shut down all my feelings when it gets too hard. that must be nice at times. i feel everything so deeply and can't cut that part of me off and it's overwhelming.

please keep praying for me I don't know how much longer i can do this

#im destroying myself mentally emotionally physically spiritually #if it's able to be crushed im crushing it #it hurts #it hurts so much #but it's easier to let it hurt than to try to heal #i speak

[peckhampeculiar]

Twerking nine to five

PECKHAM’S KELECHNEKOFF STUDIO OFFERS FITNESS CLASSES RANGING FROM POLE-DANCING TO TWERKING TO YOGA. We meet its inspirational founder – the personal trainer, actress and Peckham resident Kelechi Okafor

WORDS JUMOKÉ FASHOLA PHOTO DILESH SOLANKI

I don’t think you could find anyone prouder to be a south Londoner than Kelechi Okafor. Born in Nigeria, she arrived to join her mother in Peckham at the age of five and the area has been her home ever since.

Describing herself as a ride or die Peckhamite, she not only lives locally, but has also established her Kelechnekoff fitness studio here.

Kelechi is a fierce, fun and fabulous woman, with boundless energy, who sees her remit as one of reclaiming the narrative about what it means to be a strong black female in the age of social media.

Her studio, based in the Sojourner Truth Centre on Sumner Road, offers everything from yoga to pole-dancing to twerking. Why twerking?

“One of the things I wanted from having a space like this,” she says, “is to allow women across the board to be tender and engage fully with their bodies.

“Because society has hyper-sexualised the female body so much, and the black female body specifically, there are women who just want to be as far away from that narrative as possible, not understanding that our power lies in the sexuality and sensuality of being a woman. That’s what I want us to take back.”

As an actor, director and personal trainer who specialises in twerk and pole-dance fitness, it’s been a challenging road to get to where she is today – from the homelessness she experienced as a teenager to supporting her mother and brothers, to depression, therapy, having to integrate into a new family when she first arrived in the UK, childhood sexual abuse and a lot more.

She has survived and is very open about her personal journey to date, particularly on social media. No topic is off limits – black issues, police brutality, mental health, her own recent miscarriage.

She has amassed a following of almost 35,000 people on Twitter, with a further 12,400 followers on Instagram. Where did her fascination with social media start?

“It was probably around 2013, when the shift started happening and I just felt that we had something here that allowed us to communicate with everybody, worldwide,” she says.

“I’ve always been a writer, and when Twitter came along I just took to it, because I thought, ‘This is a space where I can say what I’m thinking and I can put it out there as a form of microblogging.’

“I joined it when hardly anyone else was on there and I remember when the influx of celebrities started joining us. I thought, ‘There goes the neighbourhood, they are going to ruin everything!” she laughs.

“But it has changed and I’ve changed with it, as I saw how it allowed us to have our own voice separate from the narrative that we were getting from the media.

“I feel that this is where the power is. It’s an opportunity for me, Kelechi, to give you an alternative narrative to what you’d normally get from the mainstream.”

But in being so outspoken across her social media platforms, has there been a cost? “Yes, there has been, but I think that for anything that matters to you, there is always a sacrifice,” she says.

“Occasionally I will go online and there will be someone calling me a black b**** or a black this. Sometimes I save the tweets. Perhaps one day I’ll take it to court and then they’ll have to show up and explain that email or tweet they sent. But it hasn’t really got there.

“I did have horse manure sent to me in the first small studio I opened in Clapton, though,” she remembers ruefully.

“I had been speaking that weekend about the appropriation of black culture by mainstream pop artists.

“I was pointing out that when it’s ‘appropriation’, there’s always someone with more power who benefits from it financially. If it was ‘appreciation’, the person who has less of the power should be benefiting from it but they’re not.

“I was explaining that and someone got extremely upset with something I said, because soon after, I got horse manure posted to me anonymously.

“Although,” she laughs, “it didn’t even offend me because it was so well packaged and 100 per cent organic.”

What was the response to that experience from her social media followers?

“I have a lot of black female followers who care about my safety and care about my wellbeing. So, someone wrote an article for BuzzFeed about it, which basically helped promote my studio.

“Many people, men and women, sent me flowers and books of poetry including one by Maya Angelou. I just received so much love.”

Whatever the challenges she has faced in life, keeping fit has always been her way of working through issues.

“I’ve always been active and into sports”, she says. “Growing up, I played football and netball. It was stuff I didn’t have to try hard at, it was just a skill that I had.

“I had wanted to be head girl at school but my teacher thought I was too boisterous for that, so she said I could be sports captain instead.”

Her love of sport comes not just from her innate ability, but also from the discipline that it requires.

“When I was in secondary school I joined the air cadets. All I’ve ever yearned for, after not seeing it in the family home, is discipline. I like routine and structure.

“I think we were in year eight when we had a talk from the air cadets. And I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s it, I’m becoming an air cadet.’”

True to form she worked hard at it and for her, “the psychological part of the training gave me a break from being the one who did everything at home and having to be in control of everyone. I wanted and needed that break.”

Alongside fitness, her other passion is acting. It was a choice of career that her mother was dead set against.

“I can understand why,” she muses. “If you’re losing your home and don’t have a regular job, what you want for your children is a steady job. You want to know that they will never suffer or want for anything. Mum was like, ‘Just be a lawyer, you are such a great orator’.”

As a compromise, Kelechi found a course that would allow her to study both drama and law at Liverpool Hope University.

“I’d never been to Liverpool before,” she says, “but that’s the only place which was offering that degree.”

Coming back to London, she started working at a call centre and found it soul destroying.

“I remember going through London Bridge one day and just thinking, ‘There has to be something I can do where I’m not at the mercy of this corporation’. And I just thought, ‘I’ll become a personal trainer’. Fitness was the thing I loved most after acting.

“I saved up my money from my job, paid for a distance learning course and then I did lots of work experience in different gyms.”

Her business took off straightaway, courtesy of her followers on social media.

“When I did qualify, there were already women on Twitter and Instagram who were like, ‘Just come and train me’.

“So I went into that and that’s when I started to see the kind of freedom and flexibility that I could have access to without being at the mercy of big corporations.”

Her personal background means that she has a real desire to see women embrace who they truly are, not just physically but also emotionally and spiritually.

“What I really want for women to understand, especially when it comes to our bodies, is that we only have this one body,” she says.

“When I start training people, I want them to understand that there’s nothing I can do that’s going to make them more beautiful.

“I can get you slimmer if that’s what you really want. I can get you more toned, but none of these things are actually going to make you more beautiful, because it’s not really based on what you look like.

“[It’s about] getting my clients to understand that to me, personal training is 80 per cent psychological and emotional, and 20 per cent physical.

“You didn’t come to me because you care about your fitness, not really. There’s something else that’s happening there. What is that thing?

“If we talk about that ‘thing’, then the fitness doesn’t feel so bad. I’ve had women and men break down into tears when we’ve been having a session because I will say things like, ‘I just feel today that you’re holding a lot in’.

“I can feel it and then they let that out. And that’s what they needed. Then they feel safer because they know that I will spot it if they’re holding a lot that day and we taper the session to create space for them.”

She’s irritated by men who try to dominate in gyms. “I’ve had it myself when I’ll be training at the gym and a guy who clearly knows nothing about fitness comes up to me, just because I’m a woman, and says, ‘So when you’re doing this you really want to do it like this.’

“Wait, you’re telling me, the actual professional, how to do it?! And then they often have the temerity to say, ‘Don’t grow too much muscle though, because you don’t want to look like a man.’”

She dislikes the way Christmas and the new year are promoted to us commercially.

“It’s interesting to me how around Christmas time, the focus in adverts is on massive turkeys, chocolates etcetera, pushing a form of gluttony on us.

“Then as soon as January hits, it’s ‘You, disgusting fatty, get to the gym, get fit’, and I just think that we have to pull ourselves out of that. We are being sold one thing while being beaten with another. What does that do to your self esteem? We never know where we stand because companies were just telling us five minutes ago to eat all of the food!”

What’s on offer at her own gym is a way, according to her, of connecting women to the “divine feminine” through dance.

“With the twerking classes at the studio I wanted to celebrate my African-ness while still paying homage to the ways in which it has changed and how it’s now become linked with hip hop culture,” she says.

Also available at the Kelechnekoff studio are very popular classes in pole-dancing and also yoga, which she is particularly keen to make accessible to all, especially those on lower incomes.

She hopes in 2019 to include a few more aerial disciplines, such as aerial hoops and also Wing Chun defence classes. Primarily though, whether it’s a twerk hen party or a pole-dancing class, her dream is that the studio continues to be a fun place that celebrates all women.

On a personal level as we approach the new year, she’s living by her own mantra: “Don’t stop striving for that thing that makes your heart warm. You deserve it. You can achieve it.”

[caradunningart]

Chris Cornell & Chemical Imbalance

I don't know a lot of things. I know a few things really well. One of them is how to destroy myself. What I do know is that every time I have ever taken drugs of any kind that altered my thoughts and feelings- I would first feel differently, that would Make me behave differently, and then because I was feeling more or feeling less, and I was willing to behave differently than I normally would, I would make different choices. Many of those choices I would regret as soon as I had come down. And many of those choices I would realize were destructive. I also know I do not think it's wrong to talk about depression or to destigmatize it- we should be talking about it, absolutely. Definitely not meaningless. For the most part I was really liking the article, until i got to the part where "depression is caused by a chemical imbalance". This statement frustrates and angers me to no end. You can read about the myth behind the "chemical imbalance" in many places, some very scientific, some not as much- but one thing is true- There is no lab test that has ever proven there is a chemical imbalance in the brain. This is something that has been pushed to no end by pharma in a big way. To sell pills. Even if you can find an article that tries to suggest otherwise- bring me your blood test- bring me your lab results. It doesn't exist. It is explained very well by several reputable sources like psychology today, the scientific American, citizens commission for human rights has loads of articles quoting psychiatrists themselves saying it's a theory- not a fact. There has been however, brain mapping - brain mapping shows brain activity. It has shown connections to depression and lowered or raised brain activity in certain areas, and some like to tout this information as proof of imbalances- the only problem with this is that if pharmas drugs were actually curing a chemical imbalance- (a supposed lack in neuro synopsis activity means a low serotonin level or a low dopamine level etc - so give it to them artificially-)it would cure everyone- AND like antibiotics- wouldn't you be able to stop taking it? just because pills are seemingly effective for SOME doesn't mean it's correcting a condition. You take aspirin for a headache and it's possibly effective- but you are not correcting a deficiency in the aspirin your body is producing, right? So I guess it's totally cool with pharmaceutical companies that they are ruining livers and falsely advertising that it balances out chemicals when that's unfounded? You know what else has been proven with brain mapping? things like drug free therapy, stroke rehabilitation, nuerofeedback therapy, etc. studies you can look up about brain mapping have proven that they can actively change the synapsis and neuro activity within the brain without the use of dangerous drugs. While they do exist- there are few studies that cover this in the mental health field. They have shown changes in activity with Alzheimer's, stroke patients, along with many other forms of disease that effect brain function, one study was done on a blind man that restructured his brain to see with his ears using SONAR! but the mental health field always seems to lag grossly behind. Hmmm- that's weird since it's the fastest growing and one of the most profitable-maybe that research is underfunded because it's a multiBILLION dollar drug industry that would essentially become obsolete. But you know, what do I know I'm just a girl. I really truly believe there is a more spiritual cause behind some if not many ailments one can prove or see in the brain- on something like brain mapping. I hope that in my lifetime someone finds a way to prove it hands down across the board in a way that will finally be accepted. But in the meantime - I feel it is my responsibility to make sure that no matter what- the people within my sphere of influence are diligent in their research for truth and are diligent in living an authentic life. Even if that is unpopular, extremely difficult and emotionally draining. The drugs being prescribed by pharmaceutical companies CAUSE SUICIDAL tendencies - the FDA required that it be printed right there in the list of side effects on the bottle- among other horrible side effects. Many of us including Chris Cornell have lived with our existential crisis for decades, had our ups and downs, become amazing artists, writers, singers, hurt people, hurt ourselves, dimmed our light, been a creative and destructive force and lived. etc. but not all of us spoke to our wife about vacation plans right before a show and after said they- took an extra Psychotropic prescription- a drug known to cause hallucinations and suicidal tendencies- and all the sudden decided to hang ourselves. This is tragic- and I'm not saying the drugs are totally the blame- I know that there is way more going on - but Im really suspicious about wether he would have resorted to ending his life had he not been on those drugs. I wish they weren't a part of the scenario- I really wish they weren't. One study that I read did a test with 100 depressed patients. They swabbed the patients mouths and told half of them that they were chemically imbalanced- that it was a sort of biological deficiency- the other half they told there was no proof of anything biologically wrong with them. The truth was that it was a social experiment and neither swabs had actually been tested (cause that's impossible) However the results were interesting. within the group that had been told they were biologically deficient- they became more hopeless, they were less likely to be motivated to seek any life improvement goals or seek help or therapy- they felt it was something wrong with them but at the same time out of their control. I feel like this speaks loudly to our own believe system, and how we construct our minds reality, what gives us hope, and what keeps us going. What I would never want to be told is that there is something fundamentally wrong with me- for which there is no cure- but here's a pill that might help -Kind of - sometimes- but with great risk. No thankyou. I'll take all of my crazy and all of your crazy too and love you anyway- and if someone is truly a detriment to themselves and those around them- they should be kept somewhere loving and safe and comfortable and quiet where they aren't a danger to themselves or others and can recuperate and hopefully start to feel better. Not strapped to a bed and made into a guinea pig for whatever new drug or lobotomy or shock therapy some "doctor" thinks will win them a spot in a medical journal. If any of you disagree- I get that. Just know my intention is not to make anyone wrong for their decisions or their reality or their very real struggles. I say this from a place of anger and compassion for YOU and my friends and family who I strongly believe are being misled and hurt by institutions they should be able to trust. I say this because I'm tired of reading articles where people just state bullshit in passing or state bullshit as the basis of their entire article. The brain still is one of the biggest mysteries to science maybe the only larger mystery to science being spirituality and quantum physics- but we just love to fuck around with it, drug it, blame it for our problems, and on and on. Sources: https://thefirsttenwords.wordpress.com/2017/05/20/its-not-what-you-think/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-depression-just-bad-chemistry/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/curious/201403/what-causes-depression-myths-about-chemical-imbalances%3Famp http://www.cchr.org/sites/default/files/Blaming_The_Brain_The_Chemical_Imbalance_Fraud.pdf https://www.google.com/amp/articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/04/06/amp/frightening-story-behind-the-drug-companies-creation-of-medical-lobotomies.aspx https://www.madinamerica.com/2014/06/psychiatry-promote-chemical-imbalance-theory/